Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Ideal House; Reconsidered

Any architecture, to be successful, must express a clarity of vision.  The following explains the values and interests I will be exploring in my house iterations this week (this contains some content, though revised, from  my previous post).

We enter into a new age.  We are in a global world, where cultures collide and intersect, values mingle, transform, and are confronted by each and everyone.  The idea of a homogeneous architecture, if one ever existed, no longer exists.  We live in a world where technology is pervasive, lights, information, sounds, swirling in a constant tempest of  technology; which is exciting, enlivening, to us, we cannot deny.  But this heightened sensitivity comes at an expense, that of the a deadening to the physical world.  An ideal house today would make one more aware of man’s physical disposition, more able to feel the size of one’s body, more aware of the sense’s that are mans faculty; it is a house that makes one feel alive, and it does so through proportion and alterations to that proportion. Unlike the free plan of Frank Lloyd Wrigth, a plan meant for the sprawling suburb, in which the house had land to which it could spread its room and functions outwards.  The new house is one that grows and expands upwards.  It is one that celebrates an upward interlocking, expressing the joy of the verticality that we either are accustomed to, or will soon be, in our world of increasing density.  Like Le Corbusier’s Unite d’ Habitation or MVRDV’s Silodam, spatial interlocking is the new plan, one no longer in two dimensions but in three.  The house becomes an expression of environmental attention, reaching to the sky like a growing plant, harnessing wind, water, and sun.
The role of technology in architecture is to accentuate the dynamism of the architectural object.  Architecture, until this day, has remained a static object surrounded by dynamism, a kind of second-hand dynamism created by adjacency.  The seasons change, the sun rises and falls, and the moon casts down her soft light, which all render the architectural form from environment to object, a one way relationship.  Architecture, today, however responds to this dynamism, becoming itself dynamic, and fine tuning itself to the flows of the environment.  This technology operates in subtle ways, its presence nearly imperceptible, like a key being tuned, that finally hits a harmony which then becomes noticeable.  It is important that the technology not overwhelm the architecture, trumping architecture’s spatial medium for a technological spectacle, spectacles which are short lived today.

No comments:

Post a Comment